Title: Water quality evaluation analysis of an urban river based on self-organising maps: Annaba City (Eastern Algeria)

Authors: Radia Hafsi; Hamouda Boutaghane

Addresses: Hydraulic and Civil Engineering Department, Ghardaia University, Ghardaia, Algeria ' Hydraulic Department, Badji Mokhtar University, Annaba, Algeria

Abstract: The critical state of Oued Boudjemaa waters (Annaba, Eastern Algeria) remains in question. Despite the collection of wastewaters, the river remains polluted. Self-organising map (SOM) was used to explore the spatiotemporal characteristics of the urban river in order to investigate the pollution sources. Filling gaps by using the k-nearest neighbour algorithm (K-NN) and transforming the original data by the Min-Max normalisation was carried out as a pre-processing step in the application of the SOM. In the five clusters resulting clusters, it was found that the wet season is the main source of water pollution in Oued Boudjemaa (correlation with more than 90% of the initial parameters). Spatiotemporal variation on water quality is mainly a result of the impacts of anthropogenic sources such as stormwaters runoff, agricultural effluents, domestic and industrial discharges, in addition to natural processes especially water interactions with geological formation and/or riverbed deposits.

Keywords: self-organising map; SOM; pre-processed data; water quality; clustering; Oued Boudjemaa; spatiotemporal assessment; physicochemical parameters; seasonal correlation; natural pollutant; anthropogenic pollutant; Algeria.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHST.2022.123639

International Journal of Hydrology Science and Technology, 2022 Vol.14 No.1, pp.1 - 13

Received: 24 Feb 2020
Accepted: 05 Sep 2020
Published online: 30 Jun 2022 *

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